Sunday, September 23, 2012

TED talk of the day - The voices of China's workers

one was supposed to be working.. when a friend suggested this TED video..and everything paused while one saw this wonderful speaker (duh, elementary - all TED speakers are fantastic speakers)

And suddenly, the perspective changed. Factory workers were no longer a nameless, faceless collective. They were, just like Indian workers, (think factories in Mumbai some decades ago and a movie called Gaman about migration from rural areas to cities for work) , people with real personalities.. distinct aspirations, and ambition.

She has delineated the worker from the product. And presented the worker, not as another product or project or subject for theorising, but as an INDIVIDUAL. a person who has profound observations (maybe because of the culture we grow up in, and we take for granted), looks for opportunities and tries to exploit them.

There will, of course, be freeloaders. There will be people who tried and fell by the side. But in this story, there are also winners.

While there are implications for the macro economics of globalisation and Distributed manufacturing, Personally, i take away the micro story - of the persons being impacted by this on a daily basis, and of where they would have been if this opportunity had not presented itself.